Cook Local, Eat Global

I never really made baby food for Morganna when she was little. I had been raised on formula and jarred baby foods, and while I mostly breastfed Morganna, I didn’t really deviate from the idea that the baby food in jars was more nutritionally suitable for a baby than anything I could whip up in […]

I know that I just wrote about a stir-fried recipe from the eastern region of India that featured whole spices. Well, that recipe came from the eastern region of India, and this one, while it uses the same basic technique–stir frying, and similar ingredients–whole spices, is from the west, in Bengal, and it results in […]

Turnips are not one of the first vegetables most Americans would think of when they think about Indian food. Turnips are a cold weather root vegetable which I always think of as a staple of the winter kitchen. Winter is not a season that I generally associate with India. Of course that is silly and […]

One of the barriers many Americans have to trying to learn to cook Indian food is the feeling that it is too complex, difficult and requires way too many ingredients, especially spices. That many Indian recipes require more than five or six spices or aromatics is sometimes true. That there are unfamiliar techniques involved in […]

Reading cookbooks brings no small amount of pleasure to me; the best, however, broaden my knowledge not only of food and culinary arts, but also of culture, geography and humanity. Monisha Bharadwaj’s Indian Vegetarian Cooking: A Regional Guide is one such book. Curling up to read it is not only a second-hand gustatory joy, it […]